TfL Press Officers

Shaun Bailey: How many press officers did TfL employ in the 2019/20 year and what was the total cost of this?

The Mayor: Transport for London’s (TfL’s) Press Office plays a crucial role in keeping London moving. It operates 24/7 to ensure that Londoners are informed, via the media, of operational incidents across the entire TfL transport network, answering hundreds of enquiries in a timely way each week. It also delivers campaigns to increase the use of public transport, walking and cycling, to reduce accidents on escalators and platforms, to reduce deaths and serious injuries on the roads and to encourage more people to report incidents of inappropriate sexual behaviour. It also plays a central role in coordinating TfL’s communications in times of crisis, including through the pandemic, and ensures that TfL’s customers and many stakeholders are kept informed of important developments on the transport network. It is also important to note that TfL is unique in that it is not just responsible for bus and metro services like many transport authorities but has much wider responsibilities including strategic highways, traffic signals, walking and cycling​, local enforcement on the transport network, city planning, commercial property development, licensing, and advertising.
The number of people deployed across these activities, and their associated staff costs, is at its lowest level on record, with a recent restructuring having contributed to TfL’s wider work to reduce operating costs.
In 2019/20 the full-time equivalent posts within TfL’s Press Office was 25.6, down from 34.6 in 2014/15. The associated staff costs including national insurance and pension contributions were £1.92 million.
Please also refer to my answer to Mayor’s Question 2019/12296 of 11 July 2019, which demonstrates the trend in this area.

Improving London's Air Quality

Tony Devenish: Have you got any workable policies to improve London’s air quality, other than force London’s roads to a standstill, which as we have seen has the opposite effect?

The Mayor: I was elected on a platform to transform London’s air quality and have developed an ambitious package of measures which are doing this. Policies in my London Environment Strategy are expected to result in the avoidance of around 300,000 new cases of NO2 and PM2.5 related disease and 1.2 million new air pollution related hospital admissions London-wide by 2050.
A study by King’s College London looking at the overall rate of improvement in NO2 levels across London before 2016 found that if the trend of inaction seen between 2010 and 2016 continued it would take 193 years to reach legal compliance. However, further modelling undertaken for City Hall by King’s College London suggests my far-reaching policies would reduce this to just five years.
Analysis shows that measures introduced since 2016 have already helped dramatically improve London’s air, having reduced the number of Londoners living in areas exceeding legal pollution limits by 94 per cent and reduced the number of state primary and secondary schools in these areas by 97 per cent.
The award winning Ultra Low Emission Zone has contributed to a reduction of 44 per cent in roadside nitrogen dioxide in the central London ULEZ zone. There are now 44,100 fewer polluting vehicles being driven in the central zone every day with 79 per cent of vehicles in the zone now meeting the ULEZ emissions standards. While significant progress has been made, with a substantial reduction in the number of Londoners living in areas exceeding legal limits for NO2, tens of thousands of Londoners still breathe illegally polluted air. This is why I will be expanding the Ultra Low Emission Zone in October 2021.
Other successful polices I have implemented include introducing twelve Low Emission Bus Zones, cleaning up other buses with the entire fleet expected to be Euro VI by the end of this year, funding 21 Low Emission Neighbourhoods, delivering 70 school and nursery air quality audits, funding over 400 School Streets, providing a £48m fund to support scrappage schemes and tightening of the Non-Road Mobile Machinery Low Emission Zone.
Before London moved to Tier 2, average weekday traffic flows on the Transport for London (TfL) Road Network over a 24-hour period were around 6-8% lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. By providing alternatives to car use for those who can walk or cycle, my Streetspace programme seeks to prevent a damaging and unsustainable car-based recovery.